Kisses from Kotzwara
by lacedupfrilla
Summary: Feliciano Vargas one time submitted this article to a lifestyle magazine. They declined it, much to his shock, because he maintains that the lessons herein are integral to humanity. Maybe it was the bondage that got to them. Germany/N. Italy with a puny sampler of Prussia/Austria.


So one time I was watching this documentary. I don't usually watch documentaries, they usually aren't quite my flavour and I've been through a lot of stuff in my lifetime that documentaries try so desperately to pin down but always end up a few nails short. This is fine, because you can't always expect that level of nuance from recent film school graduates approaching their thirties. One of my old neighbors was like that- he thought he was a total expert on all things Renaissance art and would get all lip-twitchy at anybody claiming not to know that Raphael got recommended to decorate the Pope's library by Lorenzo, which is all well and good but I knew for a fact that it was his cousin Donato who made that pledge. I never bothered correcting him, though, because there was no real point in it. He was happier to think he was right.

Anyway, the documentary I was watching that night was about artists only getting famous after they die, which was depressing as all get out. One of the ones they talked about was this violinist from Prague named Frantisek Kotzwara, and he was really good. He composed some things too- the one they kept playing over pictures of his face was called _Sonata I in E Major_. But the thing is, said the lady on the documentary, he lived and died by the string. He used a ligature to strangle himself to death while sleeping with a prostitute. The prostitute had to go to trial for it and the papers had a field day and people never really stopped talking about it. As you can see, because it was all in the documentary. They interviewed this psychologist, who said that he wondered what kind of life this Frantisek was leading to make him want to strangle himself during intercourse. Was it a perfectionist punishment for not living up to his ideals? Mental illness? Simultaneous suicide and avenging prostitution, an institution to which he may or may not have been opposed?

Because he also wanted her to cut his penis off. She said no, though, so I can assume that he died intact.

The point is, everybody thinks that there was something very wrong with this guy for wanting to do that to himself. You could get very creative fabricating a reality for this event. I sure did. Because that night, after I turned it off and got into bed, I started thinking about the time my boyfriend asked me to choke him with his belt. I was terrified- not that I'd kill him, because I wouldn't, but that I would damage the belt. It was lovely Italian leather courtesy of myself. I bought it after three painstaking hours wandering the shops of Ferrara. It was delicate. But he was pretty adamant. See, he decided that I owed him that one because of the time I stuck my finger up his butt. I told him after that I'd do anything he asked, and he came up with the belt thing two weeks later. He said he wanted to try it. Afterwards, when he had passed out and I was showering, I decided that it was an interesting experiment. It gave me a lot to do, which is interesting, because usually I'm the more passive player in our relationship. He says it's because I'm lazy, but I think I'm just more anally receptive than he is. See: the time I stuck my finger up his butt.

When he came downstairs the next morning for breakfast, he asked me what I thought, and I said it was okay. I was more interested in what he thought, because he was the one who requested getting choked and that's usually the person you'd rather hear from. He turned all red and just thanked me for going along with it, which in his terms means he was completely through the roof.

A month later, we were staying in Vienna on part of a conference and were set up in a neat little hotel overlooking all these _Jugendstil _buildings and pretty cafes and fountains. As far as cities outside Italy go, Vienna is in my top ten favourites. Everything there almost begs to be immortalized in paint and photography, yet with it all being so gloriously old and baroque it makes one wonder where they get such inclination. It was so romantic, that room in Vienna, that I naturally found myself getting a little amorous the first night. This wasn't the best idea I'd ever had, because we had to be downstairs at eight thirty for breakfast and nine for the conference. He promised that we would have intercourse the next night, since we wouldn't need to be anywhere until noon, and I agreed. I didn't really want a repeat of Zurich, where I decided to engage in debate over reservoir preservation after a particularly animalistic night and, in a fit of passion, leapt up and nearly tore myself in two.

So after the conference, which took hours and it was dark out by the time we adjourned, he approached and asked if I would be open to trying something new tonight. I was kinda tired, but I figured if I had two Einspanner that evening instead of just one, I should be okay to go. And that's what we did, after our drinks at the lovely café with our friends. He was all quiet then- well, he usually is, my boyfriend isn't all that talkative. Usually it's me and his brother doing most of the talking, or _schnattern_, as his brother's boyfriend calls it. But he seemed sort of distracted and didn't respond for a good minute when the waitress asked him if his Konsul was to his liking.

I guess I wasn't all that surprised, then, when it turned out he wanted to get kind of freaky again. Except this time, instead of choking him, he wanted me to tie him up in a chair and gag him. I asked him if it was because he didn't want to mess up the room or bother the neighbours- European hotels aren't really known for being discrete. I remember the time I was staying by myself in Toulouse and the people next to me had a group sex club. They were very friendly and they even asked me to join, but I just pretended I couldn't speak French. They had up to seven people in there once and all I could hear all night long was "Je t'aime" on a loop and people screaming.

He said exactly, it's because I don't want to bother the neighbours or upset the room. I didn't believe him, but I acquiesced. He had all manner of equipment with him too- zip ties, a ball gag, a fancy looking rope, silk blindfolds, and just a whole bunch of stuff. I asked what to do, and he said he'd tell me. First, he said, tie his hands behind his back. I asked if he wouldn't like his shirt off first, and he said that was up to me. Considering that my boyfriend has a body that turns my knees into mush and coherence into a mere concept, well, I wanted that business button-down out of my sight. Over the ceiling fan it went. Then, he wanted the gag in his mouth. I put it on, and then looked at him expectantly. It was a good bit of time before I realized that now that he's got the ball-gag on, he can't tell me what to do anymore. I think he sensed that I was panicking a bit, because he said something but it just came out as a lot of mmm's. I was so scared! I asked him to nod if he wanted me to take it off, and he shook his head 'no', and then made a weird motion with his legs. Kind of like jiggling. I took it to mean blow job, but he actually meant there was something else in the duffel. He told me that after, and I apologized. He told me never to apologize for a blow job.

We decided that night that communication is very important, so we had a talk. It wasn't then, which would have been smart. It could have been, but the two Einspanner drinks I had didn't quite do the job and I fell asleep in the middle of his apologies for confusing me. We wound up talking at his brother's housewarming party. See, his brother had been living in Berlin for a very long time but was now making a move into a puny little flat in Vienna to be closer to his boyfriend. I wondered why they didn't just move in together, but that was neither here nor there. Besides, it wasn't like my boyfriend and I were living together. We just kinda found an area halfway between us and came together as we pleased. As it was, housewarming parties in my experience are always sort of awkward. No matter how you go, there's probably going to be some hurt feelings and abandonment woes somewhere. Don't even ask how my own brother's went when he decided to uproot himself from my place and get himself comfortable in Sicily.

There were some of those here, but I was being more than a bit ignorant, much to my regret. The meeting that afternoon, while brief, hadn't gone too well and I had completely flubbed my statement on outsourcing insurance. So I was a little dejected, which my brother says makes me wallow in self-pity like pigs wallow in poop. Only he didn't say poop. I told him I don't know if pigs really wallow in poop, they actually seem really clean, but he said I completely missed his point.

Meanwhile, my boyfriend was having an argument with his brother. It was kind of hard to tell it was an argument because nobody was yelling or swearing, just getting very close and putting strange emphasis on words like "forget" and "responsible" and "can't". I had decided, unwisely, to barge in and ask my boyfriend if he was still thinking about last night, because I sure was. His brother looked confused, then exasperated, and then stormed off. My boyfriend seemed to pay that little mind, only telling me that most of it was his fault and he owed me explanations before he forces me into further awkward situations. He said that we all need to consider the situation before letting it happen when we can help it. It wasn't until I got stuck on a crossword puzzle during the train home when I realized that he might not have been talking about sex.

Before that happened, though, we decided to open the duffel again. This time, he explained to me what all the things were and what they were going to be used for. He told me about using safe words (we agreed on "Konsul", though I reminded him that he wasn't too responsive to that word the last time he heard it). We didn't try anything that night. We didn't do anything until he visited me in Venice. I asked him if he wouldn't rather I come up to Berlin- he was so much busier than I was at the time, he usually is- but he said he's sick of Berlin. I think he missed having his brother around.

When he got to my place, I saw he had the duffel slung over his shoulder. I suppose he noticed me noticing, because he got bright red and said he hoped he wasn't being too presumptuous. I said not at all. We passed the night as usual- I cooked him something, we went for a stroll down by some shops without going in, all that and a bottle of wine. The whole time I was thinking about the duffel, and I bet he was too. Because when we got back to my place, he started kissing me. It was a kiss that meant business, which ruled out the period piece we were thinking of checking out. We wound up in my living room, myself on the settee and him between my legs (on his knees, of course, because he's much taller than me normally and with me sitting our proportions are even more off).

At some point, he broke off and whispered something, which at first I thought was _belare_, or he was asking me to bleat like a sheep. He actually said _bendare_, but his Italian was always kind of off so I wouldn't say I'm entirely to blame for the confusion.

I did up the blindfold without any worry, because if there is a way to maim a man with a blindfold then I have yet to hear it, and I was actually pleasantly surprised to feel how soft it was. Silky and gentle, not at all like the kind a kidnapper or birthday party host would put on you. I asked him why he liked to be blindfolded, and he said there wasn't any discernible reason. This surprised me, because according to him, everything comes with reason. Then again, sex isn't all that reasonable an act itself, if you ask me. And I say this as a romantic- that's where all the beauty of it comes from. Not because there is something wrong, but because we're finding what is right, even if it's solely in a visceral sense. It's a blind act no matter what.

Deciding this, I sat back on my heels and asked him what was next. He said he would list ideas and the only rule was that I had to be comfortable with it. Proud of how communication was going, I said that I was okay with tying his hands but no gags. He agreed, so I led him upstairs where I tied his wrists to the bedpost with surgeon's knots. That was a bad idea because I had a _really_ hard time getting them untied and I finally just had to take the surgeon's way out and cut them with hedge-clippers. My boyfriend said it was the most terrifying experience of his life.

The sex itself was pretty terrific, I must say. It was a whole new way of doing it, just with him being there and me being everything he could sense at that moment. Well, me and the sheets, I suppose, and the ties around his wrist (which left horrible marks afterward, but he swore up and down that he was fine).

Over time, we did this thing occasionally, on soft lit nights when humming streetlamps beckoned to moths with the sweet siren song of death, or when there wasn't anything good on TV. While it was never really did it for me the way certain other things did, things he was always willing to give a shot to but ultimately compromised his standards of cleanliness, which, I have found in my experience with them, will not do when engaging with a German. Don't leave so much as a sock on the floor when touring Baden-Baden is what I'm saying. He made really sure that everything we used was spic and span, because as he put it, anything that goes in returns bearing gifts. Ew. Why he had to tell me that before letting me drive a butt-plug in is beyond me.

Is there anything wrong with my boyfriend, like there supposedly was with that Czech violinist? Oh, definitely. If they make a documentary about his petit-mort perversity, they'll begin with how bright he is. I mean slices through game show questions like a steak knife through cheap margarine smart. Modest about it too. The lady from the Kotzwara bit, the one with horn-rimmed glasses and a bouffant, will attribute it to a lack of self-worth, perhaps flagellation from more mistakes than would do a man good and a troubling influence in his also brilliant but majorly feckless older brother. Then, he would find himself driven to destruction. No touch would be tender. He'd feel the caress of his gay lover (that's me! Ooh, that would be an even bigger deal than prostitutes! Name any monarch and I'll guarantee that tales of their sordid sexuality are peppered with gay rumour. Maybe it's the militia-like organization of matching parts that sickens them so, but you won't get any answers from me.) and think to himself, No!, how I need a lash to repent for error! He either hates the institution of pain as much as he loathes himself, or delights in its dealings, wants a taste for himself. A selfish man who longs to brunt what the gods themselves merrily dispel! A tortured heart! A doomed relic of doomed times!

Of course I made that all up. He has a really good relationship with his brother, actually, and I have been getting more and more into the whole ouchie-baba-sex. Not saying it holds a candle to smearing his ripped body with cake and licking it off, but we compromise. Once we tried to do this simultaneously, and I do not advise it unless you don't mind having tiramisu in more sensitive locales.

You probably think I'm disorganized and forgot to include this bit, but I didn't. I saved it for the conclusion, actually. Okay, so we're back at the housewarming party. I'm still a little rubbed from my botched speech, plus super guilty about interrupting an intimate discussion between the two. I talk to my own brother so rarely; I'd gulp those precious moments of any conversation like a tunafish tossed dockside. Later, his brother met me waiting outside the bathroom and said that he guessed everything was going awesome in our relationship. Cheerfully and with a little dance (mostly because I had to pee really badly and whoever was in there had actually clogged the toilet and was probably at this point trying to stuff as much toilet paper into the latrine as possible) I told him all about our new level of communication, and he looked at me all pointedly and said that what we've got right now is more precious than any outsourcing insurance. I guess my boyfriend told him about that. He said you lose more people than you'll ever think, because we mostly blame death, but the reaper isn't covering all the shifts. He said that his biggest regret is not keeping well with all the people he's ever held in acquaintance, because you never know where you may find your rock, in time it may erode and turn to silt, hearts can never break irreparably but are so deceptive in so many ways. People deceive to keep each other, he whispered, eyes red with the promise of tears, and isn't that the worst thing of all?

I didn't realize until I sat down to write this just how true this may be. We, as people, so frequently lose not only each other, but ourselves, to our deceptions fraught by our delusions of what life should be. Life should be an open book, not something left molding on the shelves, first cracked decades later when all we can do is hopelessly speculate on somebody who never met a thing to us, those we truly love elsewhere doing only God knows, and he'll never tell.

I'm proud to be involved in something not perverse, but precious. It won't make for a good documentary, but it makes for sex that's far beyond good.

Ciao.

FV


End file.
